Originally Posted by
Ed Kreamer
Hello Vinney and greetings from the peace loving Peoples Republic of Washington State;
It would appear that you have made quite a find, and with the good links our colleague Horn Fanatic has supplied us, we can deduce some of the mystery of this Item. The LF speaker is the 803, which I recall, was the direct ancestor of the 416.
The horn is the venerable 511, and the HF driver the 802. All of these were excellent products in their day, and even today sound pretty good. Don Davis and Alex Badmaief in their book How to build Speaker Enclosures, pgs 38, 39 and 40, ( Sams 1966 ) show an Infinite baffle speaker using the exact components in your legatos. By the dimensions noted in one of the links provided by Horn, Your box is about 13 cubic feet in volume. BIG!! I would bet that they sound like the classic Altecs of the past.
As I have mentioned in other threads here, I built a pair very similar to your speakers in the mid '70's using two 416's the 511B, the 802-8d,the N501, and I also used the attenuator /EQ that Altec devised for the 9846/873 speaker to extend the High's. The box was 11ft3. If you look in the Altec section of the library and find the A-6 They looked similar to those.
So how did they sound? Hugely efficient, they reproduced orchestral tuttis and organ pedals effortlessly, and the stereo spread was magnificent. So why don't I have them still you ask? I got married.
So what do you do with yours? NOTHING, except maybe recap the xovers, and maybe a little cabinet refinishing if they need it.
I hope this is helpful to you.
Ed